Diasporic self-organisation through music: heritage, identity and political aspirations among Kurds in Berlin and Kurdistan's Jews in Jerusalem

This article examines how Berlin's Kurdish diaspora and diaspora-centric Kurdistan's Jews in Jerusalem embrace music performances to meet their cultural, political, and social affairs. Comparing culturally and historically connected yet politically and socially distinct dispersed populations, it argues that music performances constitute not only cultural and symbolic expressions but also wide-ranging mechanisms of cultural self-organisation among diasporic populations to express, transmit, and represent group identities and political agendas. Based on ethnographic field research, including 87 in-depth interviews and participant observations, the article explores how individual singers, music bands, cultural associations, and religious institutions perform and facilitate music to impact diasporic life. The findings suggest that Kurdish music performances in Berlin are largely intertwined with homeland-oriented political aspirations, whereas the music production in Jerusalem is treated as ancestral heritage to evoke collective memories, shaping and preserving group identities. The paper concludes that music performances across both cases form extensive mechanisms of cultural self-organisation.